Man pleads guilty to stealing $388,000 from Cisco

Mike Luttrell, 9th March 2011

A Minnesota man will serve time in prison for a dubious scheme in which he managed to effectively get hundreds of thousands of dollars in computer equipment from Cisco for free.
46-year-old Phillip Webb has entered into a plea deal, admitting he scammed the computer services company out of a whole lot of money. He was the network services manager for a credit union near St. Paul, which used a lot of equipment from Cisco.

Webb reportedly would call up Cisco and say that some of his company's computer parts were not working and needed to be replaced. So Cisco sent out brand new replacement parts. The only problem is there was nothing actually wrong with them.

So Webb just pocketed the brand spanking new components from Cisco, and when the company asked him to send in the faulty part from his office, he found a beaten up version of the part online, bought it, and sent that cheap part back to Cisco claiming it was the one his company had been using.

He then sold the new parts and made quite a hefty little profit.

According to officials, Webb managed to do this time and time again with a total of 42 parts before someone noticed something fishy was going on. In total he received $388,000 in equipment over the course of the scam. It's unknown how much he spent on the bogus parts to send back to Cisco, but as part of his plea deal he was ordered to pay $170,000 in restitution.